How to remove invalid UTF-8 characters from a JavaScript string?
- by msielski
I'd like to remove all invalid UTF-8 characters from a string in JavaScript.
I've tried using the approach described here (link removed) and came up with the JavaScript:
strTest = strTest.replace(/([\x00-\x7F]|[\xC0-\xDF][\x80-\xBF]|[\xE0-\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2}|[\xF0-\xF7][\x80-\xBF]{3})|./, "$1");
It seems that the UTF-8 validation regex described here (link removed) is more complete and I adapted it in the same way like:
strTest = strTest.replace(/([\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\x7E]|[\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF]|\xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]|[\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2}|\xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF]|\xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2}|[\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3}|\xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2})|./, "$1");
Both of these pieces of code seem to be allowing valid UTF-8 through, but aren't filtering out hardly any of the bad UTF-8 characters from my test data: UTF-8 decoder capability and stress test. Either the bad characters come through unchanged or seem to have some of their bytes removed creating a new, invalid character.
I'm not very familiar with the UTF-8 standard or with multibyte in JavaScript so I'm not sure if I'm failing to represent proper UTF-8 in the regex or if I'm applying that regex improperly in JavaScript.
Any help appreciated. Thanks!
